


gunmetal universe

by Thegaygumballmachine



Category: Major Crimes (TV), The Closer
Genre: F/F, HAPPY BIRTHDAY DANIELLE LOVE U, Masturbation, Okay bye, STEALTH HOT MESS, also flashback gayness, and because this is for danielle's birthday:, and lots of lesbian activity also, and so is sharon but like SECRETLY, blame her, brenda being repressed kind of, brenda leigh johnson is a hot mess, i hate the ending on this but lydia said it was fine so here we are, jokes about card games, m i n i b a r, mentions of various other characters also, sharon being a Whole top, shitty writing because most of this came to be at like 4 am, solitaire is a main focus, the original title of this fic in my docs was 'brenda plays solitaire', this is so ridiculous in so many ways, truth or dare!!, uHhH voyeurism??, willie rae johnson will Kick Your Ass
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-08-30
Updated: 2019-08-30
Packaged: 2020-09-30 19:06:48
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,489
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20452082
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Thegaygumballmachine/pseuds/Thegaygumballmachine
Summary: “I thought I might go out tonight,” she says. “Do some gamblin’.”“That,” says Sharon, sticking her head out of the bathroom just to raise her eyebrow, “is the worst idea you’ve had all day.”





	gunmetal universe

**Author's Note:**

  * For [UbiquitousMixie](https://archiveofourown.org/users/UbiquitousMixie/gifts).

> Happy birthday Danielle!!  
I hope you enjoy this lil piece and have much cake and rejoicing :)

It’s going on seven when they get in, and Brenda’s just about losing her mind. 

(“I love a good road trip,” she’d said. “I’d be happy to tag along,” she’d said.

Sharon, as it turns out, likes classical and Britney Spears and nothing in between, stops four times in an hour for the bathroom or to check the bags or to call someone about something unimportant, and is loathe to talk about anything, anything at all, that isn’t to do with where they’re going.

Besides which, for whatever reason, she can’t seem to read a map.)

They’re in Vegas for two days and three nights. Brenda is here, officially, for moral support, and Sharon as the designated Major Crimes representative for the annual technological expo, which she abhors and cannot bring herself to go to alone. Brenda’s genuinely interested, has been only once before and was, then, with the Company, on other unofficial business that kept her from really seeing much at all.

There’s a pack of playing cards next to the Bible in the top drawer of the dresser, and Brenda shuffles aimlessly while Sharon gets all her suit jackets onto hangers in the closet. She was unpacked in five minutes flat and now she’s bored already, killing time until the crash hits from the donuts she bought on the road. 

“Wanna play slapjack?”

“Do I look to you like there is  _ any  _ situation in which I would  _ ever _ enjoy slapjack?”

She doesn’t, of course, but Willie Rae’s ghost would’ve shown up just to smack Brenda had she refrained from asking, though she prefers solitaire anyway and doesn’t think playing cards with Sharon Raydor would be a particularly good idea under any circumstance. She settles on the floor, cross legged, and bridges a few times just for the show of it. 

The sun looks different in Vegas, a touch more orange, and it melts across the room through the windowpanes, slanted shapes over the carpet. The minibar has a whiskey glass and two stemmed wine glasses, and one of them catches the light, reflects it in shimmer. Brenda stares, zones out until the sound of the sink running brings her back and she finishes laying the cards out. 

“I thought I might go out tonight,” she says. “Do some gamblin’.”

“That,” says Sharon, sticking her head out of the bathroom just to raise her eyebrow, “is the worst idea you’ve had all day.”

“Then what do you suggest, Cap’n?”

It’s a good enough setup at the start; four easy matches before she has to start the deck and two face cards. She isn’t entirely focused, tries to imagine instead what Sharon could be doing— is she taking off her earrings? Her makeup?

“We have to be out of here by six,” says Sharon, who still has all her lipstick on when she comes into the room. “Order in and go to bed early.”

“You are _way _ too responsible for this town,” says Brenda, and finds her king a queen.

——

In the end, they compromise; Sharon pours wine for the both of them and they let a lifetime movie play out in the background, something about Sandra Bullock and a fake marriage that Brenda’s seen before but still doesn’t quite get. Her glass goes neglected for her concentration but Sharon’s is almost empty already, and Brenda isn’t sure how to feel about that. 

“Truth or dare,” she says, and looks up. Sharon blinks at her like she’s grown a second head, and she laughs, matches a black nine to a red ten with a slight excess of force. “What? It’s a sleepover, ain’t it?”

There’s a silence that’s lengthy and tired, Sharon’s gaze hostile and Brenda’s lightly amused. Sandra’s making a fuss about something or other and an eight goes on the nine, then away again to top off the pile of diamonds. 

”Truth, then,” says Sharon, bitter all along it. She finishes the last dregs of her wine and stands to pour another, setting her glasses on the table by the bed as she focuses, reluctantly, on Brenda— who’s now up to eights in every suit with six cards left unrevealed. She tilts her head back, takes a draw from the deck, and hums a half formed thought. 

“Are you goin’ out with Flynn?”

Sharon — who took her drink at precisely the wrong time — splutters, coughs, and turns her glare up to maximum, leveling it at Brenda with a force typically used only on criminals and, some days, Provenza. 

“Oh my goodness, absolutely not,” she says, and it’s a little hoarse but the conviction is there. “ _ No.  _ You’ve mixed up your jack and your queen.”

“Dammit.”

“Not Andy,” says Sharon, barely under her breath, and sorts the cards out herself when Brenda tries and fails twice to figure out where she went wrong. “Never Andy.”

“Why not?”

“It’s your turn, Brenda.”

It’s tens in every suit before she chooses, and Sharon’s lounging on her bed, skimming over various takeout menus from the dresser. 

“Truth,” she grumbles, because she was always going to, it just took her this long to admit it — and Sharon snorts, tosses away an overpriced Chinese offering with no small measure of disdain. 

“Since we are  _ apparently _ being children tonight… tell me about your first kiss.”

_ “What?” _

“So you get to be invasive and I don’t? Doesn’t seem very fair, Chief.”

She’s squinting at a mustached cartoon chef, and Brenda’s finishing her game up one way or the other; if the card under her king of spades isn’t the jack of hearts, she’s lost. 

“You have  _ got _ to stop callin’ me that,” she says, sticks her tongue out to the side as she neatens up the piles. “Okay, okay… Bobby Charlton, freshman year. He had onion breath. Told me they called him a chicken so he just  _ had _ to do it.”

Sharon seems to be gearing up to say something about that, but the mystery card is a queen, and Brenda beats her to it with a whine.

“Shocking,” says Sharon, utterly devoid of emotion. “And you were so close.”

——

Sharon takes another truth after they settle on the Indian place downstairs and she calls in the order. She’s changed into pajamas, and they’re sophisticated— pale green silk in two pieces, shorts and a button down. Brenda’s stretched across the wrong length of her bed, chin resting in both her hands. 

“Why not Flynn?”

Three beats pass. Sharon looks down and away to cover the way her cheeks fill with pink. It doesn’t quite work, but Brenda isn’t any better at hiding her surprise. 

“I… there just isn’t… I’m not interested.”

“How vague,” says Brenda. 

“Forfeit, then,” snaps Sharon, and perhaps it’s sharper than she meant it; she turns fully toward Brenda and gives a long-suffering sigh.

“Nah, that’s okay.”

Brenda knows better by now than to press any further, but any number of questions swirl around in her head anyway, invasively loud, and she drops her gaze, counts out colors in the carpet. There’s a blue speck a little to the left, a black one further up.

(She recalls a conversation she had with Mike last week, brief and over the phone; he’d called them friendly, nothing more. Maybe it’s just her drawing unwelcome conclusions.)

“Have you ever been with a woman, Brenda?”

It shocks her so much she almost falls off the bed, and her immediate thought, which is a slightly hysterical ‘ _ what?’,  _ flares out rather dramatically when the room comes into focus again and she makes out Sharon’s glassy, worried eyes. She seems to realize what she’s said in a moment or two, falls on her back and spreads herself out across the mattress, but Brenda will have that expression forever, to puzzle over and analyze till the day she dies. 

“Purely an academic question, of course,” Sharon says, a little muddied in the pronunciation, and cards her hand through her hair, ruining the meticulous styling without a second thought. “A scientific interest.”

And it may be that, but it also isn’t — the flush never fully left Sharon’s cheeks, a strange slash of color across the fairness of her skin, and there’s a warmth in the way she asks that says she’s personally curious. Brenda studies her, looks for her tells, finds her tugging on the hem of her top and realizes she’s well and truly nervous.

“No,” she says, very softly. Sharon meets her eyes, and if Brenda didn’t know better, she’d say there was a flicker of disappointment there. “But I’ve wanted to.”

“Hm.”

“Have you?”

“Yes.”

It’s different now, between them; there’s an energy there, white hot and giving off sparks, and there’s an unbelievable pressure on Brenda’s chest, leaving it tight and turning her breath shallow. She sits up, fiddles pointlessly with her skirt, and Sharon follows her hands, watches them intently. 

”Oh,” Brenda whispers, and she’s trembling with it, doesn’t quite know why. Sharon’s breath catches, and the muscles in her throat work as she swallows it. 

“Blondes, mostly,” she says. “Blondes with brown eyes.”

——

There was a brunette with green eyes for Brenda, once. 

Amelia Stewart went to Columbus High School, and that was Brenda’s fifth in two years — Clay stationed at Fort Benning, this time, and none of the Johnson siblings loaded down with delusions of friendship or, god forbid, romance. Brenda liked the chemistry program, hated her history teacher, but didn’t really, honestly care about any of it at all. 

Amelia took her behind the bleachers and kissed her during a football game she hadn’t wanted to go to in the first place. Her cheer skirt had grass stains on it and her lipstick tasted like strawberries, and it felt so wrong and strange and  _ wonderful  _ Brenda didn’t know what to do with herself.

They moved again before semester’s end. Amelia gave her a Polaroid with a strawberry lipstick kiss at the corner, to keep in her next locker when she got it. 

It went to the bottom of her bedroom drawer in six separate pieces. 

——

“You’re drunk,” says Brenda, after her head stops spinning. Sharon smiles, a sly little twitch of the lips.

“Tipsy, maybe.”

She says it calm as anything, and Brenda’s heart fixes to pound out of her chest. The moment goes taut and she wonders when it’ll snap, when all this tension will bubble over into something irrevocable. 

“Truth or dare,” says Sharon. It’s a new register for her, rich and weighty. It puts a shiver just under Brenda’s skin, settling hotly in her lower abdomen.

“Dare.”

“Take your skirt off. Right now.”

There are so many reasons she shouldn’t, but she can’t quite think of them just at the moment, and she feels a little reckless, a little fearless. It hits the floor quietly and without ceremony, leaving plain white cotton behind.

She’s holding her breath, can’t bear to let it go. Sharon’s is ragged at the ends.

“Good,” she says. Brenda makes a soft sound in the back of her throat, and this is such a terrible idea she doesn’t know what to do with herself, but she can’t seem to stop. “Now tell me what you want.”

She can’t speak. Anything else she might say will ruin this, and that’s the last thing she wants. Her energy overflows and the panties join the skirt in five seconds flat. The look Sharon gives is unmistakably hungry now, and she presses her thighs together, claws at a false sense of modesty. 

“Oh,” says Sharon, breathy and hot. “I see.”

——

They come to a strange sort of impasse. 

Brenda, for all the bravado she had before, is loathe to actually touch Sharon — not for lack of wanting, but because she’s always seemed like more of a painting than a person, glowing and sophisticated and complemented with all the right colors. 

(Sharon, for her part, can’t seem to move.) 

They’re staring at one another and the light is fading incrementally, the only change in an otherwise perfectly still tableau. Sharon’s breathing takes up too much space and Brenda’s cheeks are red with the wait. 

The knock at the door makes them both jump, and that forces action on both sides; Sharon to answer, Brenda to cover herself as minimally as will be acceptable. Sharon is short and clipped with the delivery boy and pays too much by fifteen dollars but doesn’t seem to notice or care, abandoning their dinner to the desk. 

The heavy feeling in the air doesn’t go away or even diminish; Brenda’s still sweating and the sun’s fully down now, leaving the only light in the room to come from a poorly made table lamp, flickering on and off at its leisure. 

There’s a particular concern in Sharon’s eye when she turns to Brenda again, but she drops the sheet preserving her modesty in five seconds flat and, with a confidence she doesn’t feel, says:

“I’m not goin’ anywhere.”

——

Brenda makes three assumptions in the following silence. 

The first is that Sharon hasn’t come out of whatever reverie inspired her to start this in the first place, and that she continues to want it despite the interruption. The second is that she, for whatever reason, is just as hesitant to touch Brenda as Brenda is to touch her.

The third, and perhaps the most important, is that she likes to watch. 

(She’s been to Sharon’s apartment once or twice. The woman has a taste for the aesthetic, a developed appreciation for art, and, if her scathing observations about Jack are any indication, for sex.

It isn’t too much of a stretch to put the two together— though it might be to call herself  _ art _ .)

With excruciating slowness, she parts her legs and drags a finger halfway up her right thigh, keeping careful eye contact with Sharon all through the motion — it pays off in stages, and Sharon slumps onto the corner of her bed, licks her lips carelessly. 

“Wait,” she says, so Brenda does. “Slowly.”

She nods, tilts her head back. She can still see Sharon but the pose shows her neck off well, and that works in her favor as she starts to tease herself, gently but with purpose. 

“This what you want, Cap’n?”

“Yes,” says Sharon. She’s very quiet and she’s got a slow flush building, brightening her up from the inside out. “Yes, I think so.”

Brenda isn’t all that experienced with the concept of slowness in sex, but it comes easily enough to her now. She’s putting so much thought into this and at the same time she isn’t thinking at all, all of her focus on the way Sharon’s top is riding up on her hip and the strain that keeps coming up in her breath.

She’s moving indiscriminately, tracing patterns along the insides of her thighs and little patches of stubble and sometimes barely across her clit, and it’s doing more for her than it should already, but then Sharon starts to give her orders, and they are orders, Brenda’s heard her give them before and it’s the same tone exactly, and that drives her  _ mad _ .

“Go inside,” she says, and it’s steel.  _ “Slowly, Brenda.”  _

“Sorry,” says Brenda. She isn’t, at all. Two beats go by in the laugh that bubbles out of her, and Sharon smiles, just barely, but her eyes are fixed, and even that is overwhelmed with want. 

She pushes her glasses up to the top of her nose, and why that has Brenda gasping she’ll never rightly know. She steadies herself on her free hand, leans back into it. Sharon purses her lips, and Brenda lets a lazy rhythm take her over, keeps it slow and rolling and never lets her eyes close completely. 

And it’s good — it can’t not be, but it’ll never be enough, and it doesn’t take very long at all before she starts to get desperate, starts to shift and pant in a way she’s only partly embarrassed about. 

“Shar—“

“Do it how you like it,” says Sharon, cuts her off carelessly, and she whines, can’t help it, strokes harder and deeper and feels it bloom in the furthest reaches of her body until she’s moaning without any thought to it at all. “There you go.”

It’s never like this, not really, but Sharon’s eyes on her are furnace hot, and she loves this in a way she didn’t think she would, feels the desire in her blood. The heel of her hand presses just right and she shifts up, drops her mouth open when it all works together and her mind blanks out. 

Sharon’s pulling on the collar of her top now, twisting it this way and that, and Brenda thinks she’s showing remarkable restraint for what this is and who they are. She feels heavy and hot all over and she’s so slick the friction isn’t enough, not anymore, she can’t… 

“Stop.”

Even the word itself is painful, and Brenda gasps, bites her lip, tries to process for longer than she ought. Everything in her screams to ignore it, and she does try, chokes out a little ‘no’ that gets Sharon’s eyes to narrow and her shoulders to tense. 

“Brenda.”

There’s something dangerous in her voice now, something Brenda can’t rightly disobey; she drags her hand away to sit on her thigh and cringes at the texture, focusing on anything at all but the ache between her legs. 

“What for,” she asks, all out of breath, and Sharon stands, then kneels, then presses Brenda’s knees as far apart as they can go with firm, careful hands. 

“Let me,” she says, and Brenda’s apprehension melts into a laugh that’s relief and arousal in tandem.

“Why, I’d be delighted.”

——

It’s all black after that. 

Sharon licks stripes of fire and Brenda loses herself in them, rhythmic pleasure-pain in a wash of color across her body. She could float away, feels dirty and pure at once and craves so badly for something she can’t name, doesn’t understand.

Her sticky hand goes unthinkingly into Sharon’s hair, tugging sharply on the ends, and she’s tingling down to the tips of her toes, too hot to focus. This is better than anything she’s ever felt, and Sharon’s just so  _ good  _ at it that she can’t do much but hold on. 

“Oh my lord,” she whispers, “I… that’s…  _ oh. _ ”

And then Sharon steadies her thighs with both hands and laps at her, every bit of her attention on Brenda’s clit, and it almost hurts; she’s shaking all along her bones, overwhelmed with sensation, and it’s like her soul leaves her body for just a moment and she can see Sharon on the floor, the carpet digging into her legs, doing everything she can to get Brenda to come. 

“Oh,  _ Sharon _ ,” she gasps, and she’s gone— it all builds up and up and  _ over _ and her rapture goes supernova, whites her out until the only thing she knows, the only thing that exists, is Sharon’s sure grip and steady rhythm, soothing her through the high. She can’t seem to stop shaking, and there’s pleasure everywhere, a slow boil filling her up and just as quickly draining away. 

It’s too much, not enough, everything at once, and she’s sobbing Sharon’s name now, as close to tears as one could possibly be without the actuality of crying, and Sharon  _ knows _ . She knows exactly what to do, exactly what this means to Brenda, because in some bizarre twist of fate she’s become the one person that knows Brenda, this Brenda that fucks women in Vegas hotel rooms on a half glass of wine and a whim, the best. 

She strokes her down, holds her hand, comes up to sit beside her when she’s too sensitive to take anymore. Her fingers go into Brenda’s hair, matted with sweat, and comb it through with a gentle touch. 

She’s sweet, and it’s odd — as close as they’ve gotten, Brenda would never think to describe Sharon as sweet. Her breath shudders long, and the curl that’s fallen in her face flutters with it like a sheet in the wind. 

“You did well,” says Sharon, and Brenda wants to laugh, can’t quite seem to. She shakes her head, and Sharon is ready for it, rubs little circles at the small of Brenda’s back. “It’s never easy, the first time.”

“I’m forty-seven, for heaven’s sakes,” Brenda chokes, and then she does start to cry, can’t seem to help it. Sharon’s hold becomes a hug, or something like it, and this too ends up being a discovery they weather together, a balm to Brenda’s jagged emotions. 

They stay like that for longer than Brenda can count in a measure of time, Sharon’s understanding too deep to be coincidental. It’s quiet, a limbo she can’t process, but she’s grateful for the calm, even slow to come as it is.

“You know,” says Sharon, after a car alarm in the parking lot shocks Brenda back to reality, “I never would have guessed."


End file.
